From: mailrus!gatech!mit-eddie!media.mit.edu!wave@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Re: Virtuality as a system of actions
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1991 20:01:16 GMT
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory


In article <1991Oct5.173816.10872@milton.u.washington.edu> smoliar@maclane.
iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes:

>>In article <1991Oct4.204919.10329@milton.u.washington.edu>
>>HSR4@vax.oxford.ac.uk (Old Baldie) writes:
>>
>>>I'm not as clued up on some of the facets of Apple's System 7 as I should be,
>>>but I have a feeling that they are exploring the use of 'guides' - male and
>>>female cartoon characters who will assist Users with questions.  (I may be
>>>off-beam here and it might be Xerox or some other company employing the
>>>metaphor - if you know differently I'd welcome some feedback).  I gather that
>>>the characters' mouth will open and shut in the style of the best puppet shows
>>>to match the speech (not clear if this is to be balloons or actual digitised
>>>sentences).
>>

Ah, Guides...  Well, Guides is from Apple, but it certainly isn't part of System
7.  Guides was/is a project in the Advanced Technology Group.  The idea was
to "reduce the cognitive load on users that is created by "navigating" while
trying to learn".  They were given a database of text from Grolier's Electronic
Publishing which included a hierarchical topical index (some 200 items), images
from the Bettman archives, animated maps from R.R. Donnelly Cartographic, music
from Folkways Records, and HyperCard as their delivery software.

In a discussion I led for a class last week, we (well, scratch that, these are
my opinions) I presented the paper "Guides: Characterizing the Interface" by
Oren, Salomon, Kreitman and Don which was in the Brenda Laurel edited book
on the Human Interface.  This was an earlier version of Guides, in which 
they were just beginning to incorporate video guides.  I also showed a video
tape from the CHI '90 proceedings from Apple called "Guides 3.0", as well
as the latest "Guides 3.0 user studies".  

My conclusion, from reading the paper and seeing the tapes, as well as 
discussing this with a lot of people, was that this was a very, very scary
project.  Not because it worked and was going to change anything, but that
it was such a mismatch of problem to solution that we couldn't believe
an obviously talented bunch of people at Apple spent so much time on the
thing.  

Consider: they were given a database consisting solely of third person, 
omniscient view material, and they're asked to put an interface on it
which will allow a user in an educational setting to browse through
the data in a fashion stressing the material, not the navigation.  So what
do they do?  They stick a set of first person views on the data, thereby
beginning to mutate the original material itself.  In later versions, they
go so far as to put a high degree of production value and effort into 
constructing a few guides, which are little more than filmed stories of 
actors and actresses telling stories.  This data is completely orthogonal
to the original dataset they were given...

Well, I spent last week ripping apart Guides and I don't want to continue
to do it here, but I thought I would clear up any thoughts people might 
have about there being anything more than "balloon help" in Apple's System
7.  

Guides, for all its flaws (and there's lots of them), is notable for one 
thing - these folks actually built this system, had some people use it, 
and wrote very honest papers about it.  It gives people something very
real to discuss, something very centered in an actual implementation, and
I think that's great.  That's one thing about a lot of the traffic on this
particular newsgroup, there's a lot of handwaving, and not a lot of talk
about actual implementations.  That's not intending as a dig - I just wish
I didn't have to hit "n" quite as much...
  
-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu


[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Thanks to all for the informed discussion regarding
the Guides project.  As long as we can extract from the Guides project
lessons for the design of virtual worlds, let's do so.  But if we are at
the end of that benefit, I would recommend that further discussions of
Guides be conducted in comp.sys.mac or comp.graphics.visualization. --
Bob Jacobson]